This exhibition takes its title from the central room, Room #8, a large-format, panoramic quadriptych spanning more than 10 meters across two adjacent walls.
The installation gives this representation of an interior a three-dimensional reality, reproducing a physical space in an ambiguous way, since the angle doesn’t exist in the image. This distortion of perspective and dimension occurs in all the images on display.
Still in Room #8, the identification of different objects collected by the artist is made difficult by a game of scale: the print reproduces the elements in a format slightly larger than their actual size. The objects themselves, a mixture of raw and finished materials, stand upright against the wall, exhibited like works of art despite their everyday nature: a glass, a lampshade, a toolbox. This shift in perspective changes our normal perception, requiring us to closely observe the materials which are only color, texture, shape and symbol.
In all of Ilit Azoulay’s photographs, the viewer must navigate through a setting as realistic as it is abstract. The viewer is free to interpret these compositions as real spaces adjusted by the artist before being captured, or as geometric figures guided by lines and colors. The way the gallery is laid out, reconstructed for the occasion around three interconnecting triangles, accentuates this geometric game.
The artist’s most recent photographs, taken in a space of construction instead of destruction, rid themselves of color to fully embrace shapes: circles of electrical fittings, the sharp angles of walls and windows, wires stretched taut across blank dwelling spaces, spirals of unconnected cables, square slabs and air vents, rectangles of windows and the occasional reconstructed shapes.
Here the intervention of the photographer is less obvious. The latest compositions imitate the chaotic realism of a worksite. It might be read as a metaphor for the artist’s own work, which is constantly developing.
Laurence Cornet
Room #8, Ilit Azoulay
Until April 13th, 2013
Andrea Meislin Gallery
534 West 24th Street
New York, New York 10011
USA
Tél. : +1 212 627 2552
